Topic
Grammar quibble: pet vs. petted
Please, please change "You pet a pig" (or whatever) to "petted"! Everything else is in the past tense ("You watered a tree," etc.) but then "pet" is in the present tense.
(Sorry if this was brought up before; I did do a forum search before posting.)
Thank you!
Replies
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Google says the internet's kinda divided on this one.
To me, "you petted a pig" sounds really, really awkward. -
Petted is, nevertheless, the correct past participle of "pet," especially when it's written. I think I know what you mean about the Internet; most deviations on this kind of thing come from spoken language, which is similar to much if not most online discourse. I don't think I'd even mind if a tree said it that way since their dialogue is stylized. But as game information in text, where the grammar is prescriptively correct in every other case, "pet" is just incorrect in this one.
(Yeah, I do tend to slide into English-teacher-speak on this subject.) -
Ah, adding the word participle to my search helped. Thanks! :) Now I'm seeing something that is "here's the way it is" rather than five billion search results about people asking and debating.
So, awkwardness aside, I support the change! - Right on. :-)
- I see this has been recategorized from "bug" to "idea." Typos are bugs in text. This isn't something I dreamt up.
- I always thought it was intentional in a cutesy way.
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I've experienced a huge amount of 'pet' instead of 'petted through reading and listening. If it should be changed, perhaps change it to "You patted a pig"?
That I know of, there's no controversy over that word's use, and it's a very close synonym. - There's no reason to change it to "patted." "Pet" has a perfectly good past participle, which no matter what you've read (and definitely no matter what you've heard), is "petted." I can't account for other people's errors and/or deliberate choices of tone, style, etc., but for accurate consistency, in this case it should be corrected.